Duncan Mackay olympics
‘Don’t worry about the delays back home, mate,” said the Greek taxi driver in London. “Things are always done in Greece at the last minute. Why should the Olympics be any different?”
It is true that appears to be pretty much standard operating procedure in Athens but not one that the members of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) are willing to subscribe to.
After three years of chronic delays and political paralysis, Athens has fallen so far behind in Olympic preparations that serious questions are being raised about whether the 2004 Games should be moved elsewhere. Earlier this year IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch warned Athens that it must urgently address its organisational inadequacies or confront the unprecedented humiliation of losing the Games.
In effect, in likening Athens’s situation to a set of traffic lights with the amber light about to turn red should its performance not improve, Samaranch’s comments amount to a test of the Greek national character.
IOC officials have tried to dampen rumours that Sydney or Seoul, the 1988 hosts, could stage the next Games but their case was severely undermined last month when Dick Pound, the favourite to succeed Samaranch as president next July, refused to rule out the possibility when asked recently.
It is these doubts that Gianna Angelopoulos-Daskalaki was trying erase when the IOC sends an evaluation team to the Greek capital this week to gauge the progress. She spearheaded Athens’s successful bid for the Olympics and has been brought back to rescue the games.
By the time the IOC team leaves on Friday, she hopes to have removed any suggestions that the games might be taken away. “We invited the Olympics to come back home,” said the first woman to lead an Olympic organising committee. “We promised to provide the best environment for the Games. We will keep our word.
“It’s a huge task. I don’t try to underestimate the extreme urgency of the preparations. Time is the most relevant and limited resource we have. I know Greece lost time. But whatever it will need we will do it. We will deliver what we promised.”
Among a host of concerns by the IOC are: an inadequate number of hotel beds; delays in deciding sites and plans for venues, including the Olympic Village; and inertia over marketing, sponsorship and broadcasting arrangements.
Although Greek pride may not allow them to admit it, Sydney lies at the root of Athens’s problems. As one Athenian involved with the organisation of the 2004 Games put it, Sydney’s Games were such a massive success senior IOC figures such as Samaranch view the Sydney organisational model as the blueprint for all future Games.
For a people that maintained the ancient Olympics for 1?000 years, nothing could match the humiliation of losing the Games, especially after the economic strides that have seen the country prosper.
Most Greeks, while conceding failure to make progress on the games, believe the condemnation by IOC officials to be a politically inspired bluff. But the city’s case has not been helped by the fact that it had a head start: 73% of the facilities for the 28 Olympic sports are in place and ready for use. And still Athens is behind schedule.
All sides agree significant progress has been made since the return of Angelopoulos-Daskalaki, a 45-year-old former member of parliament and wife of shipping magnate Theodore Angelopoulos, who is also a close relative of an industrialist assassinated in a 1986 Athens terrorist attack.
She has brought in her own team and begun cutting through the bureaucratic tangle that was holding up Olympic planning, while the prime minister, Costas Simitis, has assumed governmental responsibility for the Games.
There are also visible signs of progress in Athens. A new airport is to open next year, the new metro system carries 400?000 passengers a day and a new ring road is due to be completed in March. The organising committee has a budget of $1,7-billion (R12-billion), while the government has committed $3,2-billion to games-related projects.
“I say everything has to get better. We want the IOC to be more satisfied, so the next meeting will be very important,” said Angelopoulos-Daskalaki. “The prime minister is on top of the whole preparation and he personally takes care. We work together almost every week and work with the inter-ministerial committee to solve all these issues I don’t want to call them problems they are challenges for the country and they are issues we have to handle together.”
The London cabbie may well be right, then, and Greece’s tendency to get it right just in time will rescue Athens from the shame of being the first city to relinquish the world’s biggest peacetime event.